Thursday, June 22, 2006

Repelling tigers

Here's another fairy tale: a man saw his neighbour scattering pepper on his garden and asked why. "To repel tigers", "But there are no tigers around here", "That proves it works then".It's an important issue - how to proceed when you are fairly ignorant but the experts contradict each other? The further we go along the route to self-sufficiency the more important it is to have a good answer to that question. Do we chain ourselves to an ideology - organic, permaculture, biodynamic or anything else - so we are always certain what to do? Or do we pick one expert and follow their advice (if my granddad was still alive I might be very tempted by this option)? Or do I decide that I know best and go stubbornly my own way?

Then I realised I already had an answer to this conundrum. It's an approach I used when planning my homebirths, and then continued to use it for raising the children (which is quite similar to gardening - everyone has an opinion and every opinion is different). This is what I do:

listen to all the available advice - from people, books, the internet, the instructions printed on seed packets . . .

weigh up all the different options, giving more serious consideration to some and dismissing others quite quickly

choose a course of action which seems best to me, but I remember all the options I discarded

if it works, I stick with it. If it doesn't work, next time I try something different.

It means I will make some avoidable mistakes. But hopefully I'll only make each one once. I've been accused of pig-headedness (usually by people whose advice I didn't take) , and of thinking I know best. But I start from the assumption that I don't know best, and nor do I know who does know best. So all I can do is take responsibility for my own decisions, and try to learn from my mistakes.